Marchand on the Giller

The Toronto Star‘s regular book critic and culture columnist, Philip Marchand, has a column up about this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist, announced this past week. He confesses to having felt some unease at the announcement of the longlist back in September, mostly due to its seeming emphasis on the inclusion of writers who, as the accompanying statement from the Giller jury put it, “populate every region.” Marchand detected a familiar cultural problem rearing its head:

The list had a faint whiff of political correctness, in short. It made me recall the press conference announcing the founding of the prize in 1994 and the late Mordecai Richler, one of the three initial judges, along with Alice Munro and University of Ottawa English professor David Staines, proclaiming, “All three of us are politically incorrect. Looking for the first winner, we will not favour young writers over old writers, or vice versa. We won’t favour a book written by a woman over a man, or a black, gay or native writer, any more than somebody whose family has been here for 200 years.”The criterion was to be strictly literary quality. What a concept! Richler’s comments at the time reflected widespread unease over the Governor General’s Awards for literature, a suspicion that juries for these awards were increasingly all too aware of the need for diversity in handing out prizes — the children’s birthday party syndrome. Make sure everybody gets a prize. Although Richler did not mention regions, the biggest bugaboo in this regard was certainly regional.

Marchand, though he still thinks releasing a longlist has as much to do with politics as marketing, feels much better about the shortlist. He especially approves of the small press-bent of the list, and of the inclusion of two titles in translation.

(Which goes to show, we guess, that the definition of “political correctness” can be a slippery one.)

Related links:
Read Philip Marchand’s column on the Giller shortlist

Why the young don’t read: part XXIV

The CBC site has a piece on this year’s Canada Reads shortlist, which the on-air panel will whittle down to a single title by the end of this week. In Other Media couldn’t help but notice that, except for Mordecai Richler’s Cocksure, which takes place in Swinging-Sixties London, the titles on the shortlist either take place in the distant past or focus on small-town and rural life. Apparently us Canadians are either hard at work fixing our snowmobiles or reflecting on distant World Wars. Noticeably absent from the list is the token French-Canadian novel in translation, an oversight that is no doubt being discussed at the highest levels of the mother corp.

Related links:
Read about Canada Reads on the CBC site